2 days Ago By Mary Beth Norton
The idea that would lead to the world’s first personal advice column came to John Dunton while he was walking through a London park, one spring day in 1691. Dunton, a 29-year-old printer who liked to hang out in the capital’s coffeehouses having wide-ranging discussions with his male peers over the newfangled drink, was looking for a discreet and efficient way to help them fill gaps in their knowledge. His solution, when it came, was simple.
He would publish a twice-weekly broadsheet – cheap to produce and widely distributed by the capital’s street vendors – filled with anonymous readers’ questions, and with the answers supplied by Dunton and his two brothers-in-law, Richard Sault, a mathematician, and Samuel Wesley, a clergyman. Anonymity was key. Imagine a coffeehouse crowd (predominantly young and exclusively male) discussing astronomy.
What if one of them did not know whether the Earth revolved around the sun or the other way round, but was afraid to reveal his ignorance? He could submit his question in confidence to Dunton’s broadsheet, then read the response in a later issue. The Athenian Mercury , as the paper soon became known, would function as a kind of early-modern search engine. The first issue was printed on March 17, 1691; today, we would say that Dunton’s proposal went viral.
Within weeks, so many letters were flooding in that the Athenians (as Dunton and his associates styled themselves) were asking, futilely, for men to stop sending queries until further notice, so that they could respond to the backlog of inquiries..
